Edit Extension: Extension:Ex-2.5.4

Extension text: <span id="the-ritter-ritual-murder-accusation"></span> = The Ritter Ritual-Murder Accusation = The claim that Jews killed Christians for religious purposes was raised many times in the medieval and early modern periods. The charge was revived in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1880 and 1913, scores of ritual-murder accusations were levied across Central and Eastern Europe. A handful of these cases led to trials governed by modern court procedure, cross-examination of witnesses, and reliance on forensic evidence provided by medical professionals. Although the Ritter case is less known than others prosecuted within the Habsburg Monarchy (Tiszaeszlár in Hungary in 1882–1883; Polná in Bohemia in 1899–1900), Imperial Germany (Xanten in 1891–1892; Konitz in 1900-1902), or the Russian Empire (the Beilis case in 1913), it was one of the first of this wave of accusations and drew considerable press and political attention within and beyond the borders of Austria-Hungary. In the first days of March 1882, as the winter snows melted, the decomposing body of a pregnant forty-year-old peasant woman, Franciszka Mnich, missing since December 1881, was found in a gully in the small western Galician village of Lutcza. Medical examiners swiftly went to work on the corpse, seeking the cause of death, and police initiated an investigation. Local rumors and soon the authorities focused on Mojżesz Ritter, a Jewish small farmer who ran a village store, his wife Gittel, their two daughters, and a non-Jewish neighbor, Marceli Stochliński. The first trial was held in [[Community:Rzeszów|Rzeszów]] on December 10–21, 1882. The state prosecutor asserted that the murder of Mnich and the postmortem removal of her fetus were undertaken in accordance with Talmudic dictates. The jury, with no Jewish members, found Mojżesz and Gittel Ritter and Stochliński guilty. The Ritter couple and Stochliński were sentenced to death; the Ritters’ daughters were acquitted. In May 1883, the Supreme Court in Vienna set the convictions aside due to irregularities in the forensic evidence as well as opposition to the unfounded claim of ritual murder and ordered a new trial, which took place from October 1 to October 11, 1884, in [[Community:Kraków|Kraków]]. Again, a jury (from which Jews had been excluded) found the Ritters and Stochliński guilty. All three were sentenced to death. On February 25, 1885, the Supreme Court in Vienna again vacated the Ritters’ conviction and ordered another trial. This trial was held from September 17 to September 29, 1885 in [[Community:Kraków|Kraków]]. For the third time a jury (again with no Jewish members) convicted the Ritters. On March 2, the court dismissed the verdicts and death sentences, this time citing the complete lack of evidence connecting the death to the Ritters or demonstrating that a murder as opposed to an accidental death had even taken place. The justices ordered the immediate release of the Ritters from jail, finally freeing the couple who had remained in custody for four years. The Ritters, however, were not spared; their Lutcza tobacco shop was looted by a drunken mob on June 18, 1898. The Ritter affair has had a long afterlife. The case is included on the lengthy lists of supposed Jewish ritual murders published by Nazi (and post-Nazi) “experts” as proof of the malicious nature of Jews and of Judaism. '''Bibliography: ''' Kozińska-Witt, Hanna. “Unwarranted Notoriety? The Ritter Trials, 1882–1886,” ''Studia Judaica'' 23 (1) (2020), 75–109.

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